The Ascetic Life (Liber Asceticus)

The Liber Asceticus (The Ascetic Life, Greek Logos asketikos) is St. Maximus the Confessor’s introductory ascetical treatise, cast as a dialogue between an old monk and a young brother. Its theme is the keeping of the Lord’s commandments as the path of salvation, the devil’s three temptations as the pattern of all warfare, and love as the goal. It is the accessible doorway into Maximus’ thought, written as the companion to the Centuries on Love.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox (Church Father)

The Dialogue Form

Unlike the gnomic kephalaia of the Centuries on Love, the Liber Asceticus is a sustained dialogue – a sustained, imagined conversation in the ancient question-and-response (erotapokriseis) genre between an elder (an old monk, the geron) and a brother (a young monk seeking instruction). The brother asks the foundational questions of the spiritual life – the purpose of the Lord’s Incarnation, the aim of the monastic vocation, how to bear dishonor, how to be freed from the passions – and the old monk answers from Scripture and experience.

The form is pastoral and deliberately simple. Where Maximus’ Ambigua and Questions to Thalassius demand a trained theological reader, the Liber Asceticus speaks to the novice. It is, as Polycarp Sherwood observes, the most accessible of Maximus’ works – the natural starting point for anyone entering his thought, written in the 620s before the dogmatic controversies of his later life (Sherwood, ACW 21, Introduction). The dialogue partners are types rather than portraits: the old monk is the voice of the tradition; the brother is every soul beginning the struggle.

The Lord’s Commandments as the Path

The treatise opens by establishing the purpose of Christ’s coming. The old monk explains that the Lord became man and was obedient even to death so that, having destroyed the tyranny of the devil, he might give us his commandments as the way of life. The entire ascetical program is therefore framed christologically: ascesis is the imitation of Christ, the following of the One who kept the commandments perfectly and fulfilled the law of love (Maximus, The Ascetic Life 1-5; trans. Sherwood, ACW 21).

The summary of all the commandments is love – love of God and love of neighbor. The old monk presses repeatedly on the second: the proof of love for God is love for the neighbor, including the enemy. He returns again and again to the Lord’s words “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you” (Luke 6:27), insisting that this is not an optional counsel but the very substance of the commandment and the test of the monastic life. To keep the commandments is to acquire love; to acquire love is to be saved (Maximus, The Ascetic Life 7-9; trans. Sherwood, ACW 21).

The brother objects, as a beginner naturally would, that this is hard – that the neighbor who wrongs us makes love seem impossible. The old monk answers not by softening the commandment but by pointing to the example of the Lord, who prayed for those who crucified him, and to the apostles and martyrs who followed him in loving their persecutors. He reminds the brother that the one who keeps a grudge against his neighbor while imagining he loves God deceives himself, for “he who does not love his brother whom he has seen, how can he love God whom he has not seen?” (cf. 1 John 4:20). The whole weight of the dialogue falls here: the monastic life is not chiefly about fasting, vigil, or solitude – valuable as these are – but about the acquisition of a love that refuses resentment and wills the good even of the one who hates us. The ascetical labors are instruments; love is the end they serve (Maximus, The Ascetic Life 7-12; trans. Sherwood, ACW 21).

The three principal virtues by which this is attained are love, self-mastery (enkrateia), and prayer: love tames the incensive power and heals anger, self-mastery overcomes desire, and prayer joins the mind to God. These three together effect the soul’s healing and its return to its natural state.

The Devil’s Three Temptations

A structural centerpiece of the treatise is the schema of the devil’s three temptations, drawn from the temptation of Christ in the wilderness (Matthew 4; Luke 4). The old monk teaches that the devil assaults every person, as he assaulted the Lord, through three chief passions: gluttony (gastrimargia), avarice (philargyria, the love of money), and vainglory (kenodoxia). These correspond to the three temptations of Christ – the command to turn stones to bread (gluttony), the offer of all the kingdoms of the world (avarice), and the call to cast himself down for the angels to bear him up (vainglory) – and from these three “all the tribe of the passions is born” (Maximus, The Ascetic Life 18-19; trans. Sherwood, ACW 21).

Christ, by refusing all three, both defeated the devil and left us the pattern of victory. The Christian overcomes the same three by the opposite virtues. And beneath all three lies a single root: self-love (philautia) – “the irrational love for the body,” the mother of the passions. Maximus’ diagnosis is that all the passions flow from this disordered self-love, so that whoever uproots self-love, with God’s help, easily overcomes all the rest (Maximus, The Ascetic Life; cf. Four Hundred Texts on Love II.59; trans. Philokalia vol. 2). This identification of philautia as the taproot of sin is one of Maximus’ most influential contributions to ascetical theology, taken up by the entire later tradition.

The logic of the schema is worth drawing out. Self-love is the inordinate attachment to one’s own body and self, the turning of the soul’s love inward upon itself rather than outward toward God and neighbor. From it the three chief passions grow as its natural offspring: gluttony serves the body’s pleasure, avarice secures the body’s future, vainglory feeds the self’s craving for esteem. Each of the three then branches into a whole tribe of further passions – gluttony into fornication and sloth, avarice into envy and grief, vainglory into pride, anger, and presumption. The therapeutic implication is precise and hopeful: one need not fight the passions one by one in endless succession, but may strike at their common root. Self-love is overcome by its opposite, the self-emptying love of God and neighbor; and as self-love withers, the whole growth it nourished withers with it. The cure of the soul is thus not a multiplication of disciplines but the redirection of love itself, away from the self and toward God – which is exactly the goal the Centuries on Love sets at the summit of the spiritual life.

The Passions Are Healed, Not the Things Condemned

A consistent principle governs the whole treatise: the created order is good, and evil lies only in the misuse of good things. The old monk teaches that nothing God has made is evil in itself; the passion is the soul’s disordered relation to it. As Maximus states the principle elsewhere in language that distills the Liber Asceticus: “Food is not evil, but gluttony is… Money is not evil, but avarice is… there is no evil in existing things, but only in their misuse” (Maximus, Four Hundred Texts on Love III.4; trans. Philokalia vol. 2). The remedy is therefore therapeutic, not punitive: the passions are healed by the redirection of the soul’s powers toward God, not by the condemnation of the body or the world.

This is why the treatise ends not in despair over sin but in compunction and hope. In its closing movement the old monk breaks into a lament over his own failures and a prayer for mercy, and the brother is moved to tears – the dialogue resolves into the spirit of repentance (penthos) and trust in God’s mercy that is the proper atmosphere of the ascetical life (Maximus, The Ascetic Life 37-45; trans. Sherwood, ACW 21). The goal of the struggle is not a grim self-mastery but the freedom of love.

This closing lament is theologically pointed. By placing the confession of sin on the lips of the old monk – the very figure who has been teaching the way of perfection – Maximus forecloses any reading of the ascetical life as an achievement to be congratulated. The teacher numbers himself among sinners; the more one advances, the more one sees one’s distance from God and the more one casts oneself on his mercy. Compunction is therefore not a stage left behind but the permanent disposition of the soul in via. The treatise thus ends where the Christian life always stands: in humble repentance, in the hope of mercy, and in the longing for the love that alone makes the soul whole. This emotional arc – from instruction, through the brother’s growing conviction, to shared tears and trust in God – is itself part of the teaching, modeling the very movement of heart it describes.

The Accessible Entry to Maximus

For these reasons the Liber Asceticus has long served as the introduction to Maximus’ spirituality. It contains, in seed and in pastoral form, the themes that the rest of his corpus develops with metaphysical rigor: the primacy of love, the healing of the passions, the christological grounding of ascesis, the diagnosis of self-love, and the goal of deification. Read alongside its named companion, the Centuries on Love, it forms a complete short course in the practical (praktike) dimension of the Christian life – the foundation upon which Maximus will build his cosmic and liturgical vision.

The work belongs entirely within the living stream of Orthodox spiritual direction. Its diagnosis of the logismoi and the passions, its therapeutic understanding of the virtues, and its insistence that the cure of the soul comes through obedience, love, and the guidance of an elder are precisely the themes that the later tradition carries forward – from the Philokalia, through the Russian elders, to the 20th-century Athonite fathers.

The very form of the Liber Asceticus embodies this tradition. The relationship of old monk and young brother is the relationship of geron and disciple that the whole Orthodox ascetical tradition takes as normative: the beginner does not heal himself by his own ingenuity but submits his thoughts and his struggle to an experienced elder who knows the passions from within and can name them, weigh them, and prescribe their cure. The dialogue is, in miniature, an icon of spiritual fatherhood. When St. Paisios of Mount Athos, thirteen centuries later, teaches the discernment of logismoi, the redirection of the passions, and the priority of love and humility, he stands in unbroken continuity with the old monk of Maximus’ dialogue (see St. Paisios: The Thoughts (Logismoi)). The therapeutic vocabulary – passions as sickness, virtues as health, the elder as physician of souls – is one of the most stable features of Orthodox spirituality, and the Liber Asceticus is one of its classic early statements (cf. Orthodoxy Guide: Spiritual Direction).

References

Maximus the Confessor. The Ascetic Life; The Four Centuries on Charity. Trans. Polycarp Sherwood, OSB. Ancient Christian Writers 21. New York: Newman Press, 1955.
Maximus the Confessor. Four Hundred Texts on Love. In The Philokalia: The Complete Text, vol. 2. Trans. and ed. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware. London: Faber and Faber, 1981.
Louth, Andrew. Maximus the Confessor. The Early Church Fathers. London: Routledge, 1996.
Thunberg, Lars. Microcosm and Mediator: The Theological Anthropology of Maximus the Confessor. 2nd ed. Chicago: Open Court, 1995.